A Tale of MBA Adventure at the University of Florida

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Source: Brains on Fire

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One of the reasons I am excited about business school is that it gives me a solid excuse to get a new computer. I’ve been abusing an iBook for the last three years and I’m not sure how much life is left in her, so the timing is great. However UF, and most other MBA programs, requires its students to own a laptop that runs either Windows Vista or Windows XP Professional. Well, that’s a problem for me because I made the switch to Apple three years ago and haven’t looked back.

I could learn to accept Windows again if I had to, but do I really want to? The switch back to Windows wouldn’t be easy. All of my multimedia is stored on a mac-formatted hard drive, so I wouldn’t be able to access my songs and photos from a PC. Also, Apple’s design and user interface is second to none, so a switch from OS X to Windows would be a regression in user experience. Finally, if I bought a Windows PC it would come pre-installed with Vista, which seems to be the most hated operating system in the history of mankind.

So what to do? I can’t keep my old iBook because it doesn’t meet UF’s minimum hardware requirements, nor does it run Windows. I don’t want to buy a Windows PC because Vista sucks and my entire digital life is formatted for a Mac. Thankfully Apple gives me a solution: The new generation of Apple computers are capable of running Windows! Just install Windows, in my case an old version of XP Professional, on your Apple hard drive and upon start-up chose to launch Windows instead of OS X. According to PC World it does a damn fine job. I spoke to the IT department at UF and they agreed this set-up would meet the business school’s requirements, but cautioned me against it because most of the IT staff is not trained to troubleshoot Apple computers.

“Nearly 80% of businesses have Macs in-house, nearly double the percentage that said they had users running Mac OS X two years ago.”
–ComputerWorld 06/28/08

The reason business schools require students to own a Windows based PC is because most companies run their business on Windows. Historically speaking this is true. However, according to ComputerWorld, “Nearly 80% of businesses have Macs in-house, nearly double the percentage that said they had users running Mac OS X two years ago.” This penetration percentage isn’t going to decrease in the future. Students graduating from college today grew up on iPods and many of them now own, or plan on owning, an Apple computer. This workforce is going to demand the right to use Apples at work and companies will either acquiesce or lose talent to more progressive competitors. (sources: BusinessWeek and CIO)

I would rather push the envelope now than receive the memo later, so I rolled a hard six and put in an order for a new Macbook Pro. Clearly Apple is making gains on Windows in the business world. Within the next five to ten years I think every workplace will have integrated Apple computers into their network and employees will have the option to work on either an Apple or a Windows PC. By that time the iPhone will probably have at least a 50% share of the smartphone enterprise market too, but that is another post for another day.

Source: Strange Maps (via Richard Florida)

Thanks for bringing down our BMI South Beach! I’m drinking for you tonight.

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Now that I’m safely in business school I am happy that I will never have to take the GMAT again. Since this is an MBA Student blog I won’t talk much about the GMAT here, but I know you are probably wondering what my ‘GMAT Experience’ was like. I didn’t hate the experience as a whole, but I had to take the test twice to get into UF. That I hated.

For the most part, I liked studying useless and trivial topics that I hadn’t given a second thought to since high school. I felt the underutilized regions of my brain roar back to life and I was confident I would do well on the test. Unfortunately, I chose to study from The Princeton Review and Kaplan GMAT.

The Princeton Review and Kaplan GMAT books are average books that produce average results. I learned that the hard (and expensive) way. An average GMAT score will not get you into UF or any other respected business school. To do well on the GMAT you need to understand advanced material that Princeton and Kaplan don’t cover. The best books I found for studying advanced material were the ManhattanGMAT Strategy Guides.

I bought the whole damn set and cannot recommend them enough. They are especially useful if you have been out of school for a while and need to create a study program from ground zero.

I scored much higher on my second GMAT attempt after I spent a couple of months buried in the MGMAT books. I did better on Quant than Verbal, which was a surprise since I have a liberal arts background. I would have scored higher on Verbal if it weren’t for the sentence correction material. I worked several years in scripted television and the number one rule in the Writer’s Room is that you write ‘to the ear’ and eff being grammatically correct. Uh, that’s a great rule when you write and proof dialogue for television, but completely counterintuitive to sentence correction on the GMAT.

Despite sentence correction, I scored high enough the second time around to get into my first choice school. If you are still at the beginning stage of your MBA journey know that the GMAT can be a burden if you have to take it more than once. Skip the Princeton and Kaplan books for your prep and dive straight into the MGMAT books. You won’t regret it.

For all you applicants out there…

The GMAT is an important factor in whether a business school will admit you into its program.  However, while you should strive to achieve a high GMAT score, it is not the end of the world if you don’t score above a 700.  Nor is it the end of the world if your score falls below the average GMAT score of the number one school on your list.  As long as your score lies within the middle 80% range of accepted GMAT scores you should be able to receive an acceptance letter.

But I scored 20 points below the school’s average.

It doesn’t matter.  You can still get into your number one school, as long as your GMAT falls within a school’s middle 80% range, by writing killer personal essays.  These essays are your best opportunity to balance the statistics in your application (GMAT, GPA, Transcripts) by bringing your life experience and personality to light.  The best way to infuse your essays with personality is to write them in a conversational tone.  You don’t like to read white papers and neither do adcom officers.  Avoid using big, bloated words and industry jargon and focus on telling your story and telling it well.

What is your story?

Your story should showcase your unique selling point, the one quality that elevates your application above all the other numbskulls whom you are competing against.  For career changers, your unique selling point is your work experience if it cuts against the grain of those of other applicants, like if you were a court stenographer or a museum curator.  These off the wall career fields aren’t a hindrance to your application as long as you can convey a story that proves your experience adds value to the program.

What if I worked in Finance, like everyone else.

If your work experience comes from a typical business school feeder industry, such as finance or engineering, you might have to dig a little deeper to find your unique selling point.  Perhaps your unique selling point isn’t what you’ve accomplished in your field but rather the actions you took to achieve your success.  If you are given an option to write an essay that discusses either a work or personal accomplishment, chose the personal accomplishment.  It might be harder to write because personal accomplishments aren’t as easy to quantify as work accomplishments, but I guarantee you it’s a story no one else is telling.

By finding your unique selling point and conveying it in an engaging and conversational style, you should be able to ace the application phase and score an interview.  Good luck!

Click image to embiggen.

If you have read “The World is Flat” by Thomas L. Friedman then you are familiar with the ten unique events that “flattened” the world in his estimation. One of those events was the overinvestment in transcontinental fiber-optic cables that led to the commoditization of bandwidth. Due to the abundant supply of bandwidth, transmission of data has become virtually free. The above image is a graphical representation of how fiber-optic cables connect our world.

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